Days Before Kidney Transplant, Aries Merritt Wins Bronze in Hurdles

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Aries Merritt, right, was beaten at the wire by Russia's Sergey Shubenkov, left, and Jamaica's Hansle Parchment, center, but took the bronze in the 110-meter hurdles.CreditFranck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIJING — There are the hurdles on the track, all of which Aries Merritt cleared on Friday night on his way to a bronze medal at the world track and field championships.

But there are also the hurdles that life puts in your path, and Merritt will have to clear a high one on Tuesday, when he is scheduled to have a kidney transplant in the United States.

He said his older sister LaToya was the donor, and though other athletes, like the basketball stars Sean Elliott and Alonzo Mourning, have returned from such procedures to resume their professional careers, there are no guarantees that Merritt will be back competing at an elite level again.

“I’ve been operating for months now at under 20 percent kidney function, so just to make the final was just a blessing,” Merritt said after the 110-meter hurdles final Friday. “To be able to go out and execute and just be as mentally strong as I’ve been in these championships, I feel like my bronze medal is a gold medal, to be honest.”

The gold medal went to Sergey Shubenkov of Russia in a national record of 12.98 seconds. It was the first victory in these championships for Russia, whose track and field program faces allegations of systematic doping and is the subject of a World Anti-Doping Agency inquiry.

The bad news about the Russian program “made me upset at some point,” Shubenkov acknowledged, adding, “I tried to stay focused on my goals specifically.”

Hansle Parchment of Jamaica was second in 13.03.

But those in the know found it hard to keep their eyes off Merritt, the reigning Olympic champion, who has been unable to break 13 seconds in the 110 hurdles since his phenomenal 2012 season, when he managed it eight times and lowered the world record to 12.80 seconds.

His time of 13.04 on Friday — his best this season — was surely one of the most impressive of his career in light of the circumstances. “I cannot think how it is possible,” said Shubenkov, who was unaware before the race of the extent of Merritt’s medical issues.

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"I’ve been operating for months now at under 20 percent kidney function, so just to make the final was just a blessing," Merritt said.CreditNg Han Guan/Associated Press

Merritt’s condition became severe during the 2013 season. After he finished sixth in the world championships in Moscow, Merritt said, he was hospitalized for an extended period as doctors attempted to determine why he was struggling to recover from races and was so low on energy. Valuing his privacy and wanting to avoid answering questions on the topic, he did not reveal his condition and his need for a transplant until shortly before these championships.

Merritt said he had a collapsing variant of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, which also affected Mourning.

“A very rare kidney disorder predominantly found in African-Americans, and I’ve just been having to alter a lot of my training,” Merritt said, adding that both his kidneys were operating below 20 percent capacity and that he had had to radically alter his diet. He said he was not required to have dialysis.

“I’m not able to process potassium, so no orange juice, no bananas,” he said. “It’s just been a complete lifestyle change. As you can tell, I’m pretty thin. I’m not as toned or as bulky as I was before. I’m about six pounds under my world-record weight. It’s just been a struggle.”

Doctors encourage kidney transplant patients to resume active lives quickly. The challenge for Merritt, who turned 30 in July, will be to rejoin the world’s best.

“It’s definitely going to be very challenging, definitely more challenging than the Olympic final,” Merritt said. “Because I don’t know if I’ll be able to recover and run again. This could be my last time running. Who knows?”

Merritt said that he still had the Rio Olympics in his sights, even though those Games begin in less than year.

“I’m very optimistic about my surgery,” he said. “You might not see me indoors, but hopefully recovery will go to plan and you’ll see me for outdoor season.”

The most remarkable performances in statistical terms on Friday came from Ashton Eaton and Dafne Schippers.

Eaton, an American who holds the world record in the decathlon, ran the fastest 400 meters ever by a decathlete — 45.0 seconds — and raised both arms in weary triumph, although he had five more events on Saturday. “I thought the clock was off by a second, I swear,” Eaton said.

Schippers, a long-striding sprinter from the Netherlands, won the women’s 200 in 21.63 seconds with a late surge, just ahead of Elaine Thompson of Jamaica. The winning time was a world championship and a European record, and it made Schippers — a former leading heptathlete — the third-fastest female 200 runner of all time behind Florence Griffith-Joyner, whose world record of 21.34 was set at the 1988 Olympics, and the now-disgraced Marion Jones, who ran 21.62 at altitude in Johannesburg in 1998 but admitted in 2007 to using performance-enhancing drugs during her career.

Asked at the postrace news conference if she felt she should be ranked higher on that list in light of Jones’s doping, Schippers said only that she was “very happy with my time.” She was then asked how she might respond to those who questioned her remarkable time.

“I know that I’m clean, and I know that I worked very hard for it,” she said.

Her longtime coach, Bart Bennema, called such questions “inevitable” based on the sport’s history and current climate.

“She doesn’t have the best predecessors,” he said, “so we get those questions.”

Schippers had already won the silver in the women’s 100 here on Monday, but she was the favorite in the 200, which turned out to be the first women’s 200 in history with three sprinters under 22 seconds. Thompson finished in 21.66 seconds, with her compatriot Veronica Campbell-Brown next in 21.97.

Moments after the 200, the American Tianna Bartoletta, who was in third place in the women’s long jump, took her sixth and final attempt and sailed 7.14 meters to fly past Ivana Spanovic of Serbia and Shara Proctor of Britain into first. The gold medal gave Bartoletta her second world long jump title a decade after she won in 2005 in Helsinki, and it gave the United States its fourth gold medal in Beijing.

But a night full of emotion for the United States did not end on a high note in the final race of the evening: the women’s 100-meter hurdles. Before the meet, there had been talk of a potential American sweep. Instead, two of the four American women in the semifinals failed to reach the finish line; Dawn Harper-Nelson hit a hurdle and fell, and Kendra Harrison was called for a false start and disqualified.

“Tonight is going to be one of those nights when you get to your room, and you’re going to just cry yourself to sleep,” Harper-Nelson said.

A potential sweep turned into a shutout in the final as Danielle Williams of Jamaica took the gold in 12.57 seconds ahead of Cindy Roleder of Germany (12.59) and Alina Talay of Belarus (12.66). By the end of the night, the only American hurdles medal belonged to Merritt — something that may give him pride as well as comfort as he flies back to the United States on Saturday.

“It’s been very tough for me these last couple years,” he said. “But still, to be here at these championships, it shows I’m mentally tough and that I have the heart of a champion.”

Correction:

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article, using information from Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, misspelled the surname of the winner of the 110-meter hurdles. He is Sergey Shubenkov, not Subenkov.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: After the Bronze Medal, the Highest Hurdle Awaits. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe